Feedburner…They’re Real AND They’re Spectacular

Sometime in early 2004, I met Dick Costolo, the CEO of Feedburner.   We met about at the same time he also met Fred and Brad (I can’t remember who met who first), both of whom subsequently invested in the company.  We hit it off and had a number of informal and formal conversations over the past two and a half years about online media, the interplay of RSS and email and blogs, and entrepreneurship.  Feedburner and Return Path have developed a still-somewhat nascent partnership as well to bring ads in feeds and ads on blogs to Return Path’s Postmaster advertisers.

I was recently fortunate enough to be invited by Dick and his team to join Feedburner’s Board of Directors.  You can read the official note (as official as Feedburner gets!) on Feedburner’s blog here.  I am huge Feedburner fan and am jazzed to be part of their extended team.  The company is impressively leading its market of RSS publisher services and RSS advertising.  It’s all very reminiscent of the early days of email, and the early days of banner advertising before that.  More than that, though, I’ve been incredibly impressed with how the company operates.  They execute swiftly and flawlessly, they have a ton of fun doing it, and they have a very authentic voice and ethos for communicating with and handling their customers that I admire tremendously.  Very Cluetrain Manifesto.

In a much earlier posting, I wrote that entrepreneurs should join other boards as well to get more experience with how different organizations are run and how different board dynamics work, so I guess this means I’m following my own advice.  And so far, it’s all true — I’ve gotten a lot out of the first couple of meetings I’ve attended.  It’s a little weird for me to be the “old media” guy around the table (old meaning web and email, of course), so I’ll have to work hard to not be a Luddite and keep pace with all the new toys.

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.

Americans have long operated under an unwritten deal with media companies (for our purposes here, let’s call this the Old Media Deal). The Old Media Deal is simple: we hate advertising, but we are willing to put up with an amazing amount of it in exchange for free or cheap content, and occasionally one of those ads slips through to the recesses of our brain and influences us in some way that old school marketers who trade in non-addressable media can only dream of. Think about it:

– 30 minutes of Friends has 8 minutes of commercials (10 in syndication!)
– The New York Times devotes almost 75% of its total column inches to ads
– We get 6 songs in a row on the radio, then 5 minutes of commercials
– The copy of Vogue‘s fall fashion issue on my mom’s coffee table is about 90% full page ads

The bottom line is, advertising doesn’t bug us if it’s not too intrusive and if there’s something in it for us as consumers.

Since I started working in “New Media” in 1994, I’ve thought we had a significantly different New Media Deal in the works. The New Media deal is that we as American consumers are willing to share a certain amount of personal information in exchange for even better content, more personalized services, or even more targeted marketing — again, as long as those things aren’t too intrusive and provide adequate value. Think about how the New Media Deal works:

– We tell Yahoo that we like the Yankees and that we own MSFT stock in order to get a personalized home page
– We tell Drugstore.com what personal health products we buy so we can buy our Q-tips and Benadryl more quickly
– We tell The New York Times on the Web our annual income in order to get the entire newspaper online for free
– We let PayTrust know how much money we spend each month so that we can pay our bills more efficiently
– We let Google scan our emails to put ads in in them based on the content to get a free email account
– We give their email address out to receive marketing offers (even in this day and age of spam) by the millions every day

Anyway, after a few years of talking somewhat circuitously about this New Media Deal, my colleague Tami Forman showed me some research the other day that backs up my theory, so I thought it was time to share. In a study conducted by ChoiceStream in May 2004, 81% of Internet users expressed a desire for personalized content; 64% said they’d provide insight into their preferences in exchange for personalized product and content recommendations; 56 would provide demographic data for the same; and 40% said they’d even agree to more comprehensive clickstream and transaction monitoring for the same. All of these responses were stronger among younger users but healthy among all users. Sounds like a New Media Deal to me.

Don’t get me wrong — I still think there’s a time and a place for anonymity. It’s one of the great things about RSS for certain applications. And privacy advocates are always right to be vigilant about potential and actual abuses of data collection. But I think it’s becoming increasingly clear that we have a New Media Deal, which is that people are willing to sacrifice their anonymity in a heartbeat if the value exchange is there.

P.S. Quite frankly, I wish I could give spammers a little more personalized information sometime. They’re going to email me anyway — they may as well at least tell me to enlarge a part of my body that I actually have.

9/11’s 10th

I wasn’t yet writing this blog on 9/11 (no one was writing blogs yet), and if I had had one, I’m not sure what I would have written.  The neighborhood immediately surrounding the World Trade Center had been my home for more than seven years before the twin towers fell, and it continued to be my home for more than seven years after they fell.  That same neighborhood was Return Path‘s home for its first 18 months or so, across two different offices.  Like all Americans, the attack felt personal.  Like all New Yorkers, it was in our face.  But it hit home in a different way for those of us who lived and worked in Lower Manhattan.

For the seven years after the attacks, I stopped by Ground Zero on the morning of 9/11 to reflect and memorialize the event.  I won’t be doing that this year — between living outside the city, the kids, and the likely overwhelming crowds, it doesn’t make sense.  So this post will have to suffice as this year’s reflection on the 10th anniversary of that awful day.

My memories from that day and the weeks that followed are a little jumbled now, as memories often are.  The things I remember most vividly, both personal and professional, are:

• The smell and the smoke.  Up until the New Year, over 3 months after the attacks, a plume of smoke was rising from Ground Zero, and the air had a putrid smell of burning everything — building materials, fuel, fragments of life
• I had left the city that morning to drive to a meeting in Danbury, Connecticut at Pittney-Bowes with our then head of sales, Dave Paulus.  We both received calls on our cell phones at the same instant from Mariquita and Pam telling us to turn on the news, that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center.  For a while, everyone assumed it was an accident.  We continued with our meeting, although it kept getting interrupted with more bad news coming in via our senior contact’s assistant, until she wheeled a TV into the conference room so we could watch for ourselves
• I couldn’t get back into the city that night, so Dave and I crashed at my Grandma Hazel’s house in Westchester.  When I finally did get home, Mariquita and I met up and stayed with our friends Christine and Andrew on the upper west side and listened all night to the fighter planes cruising up and down the Hudson River, sentries on patrol
• When we finally could go back to our apartment, we had to go on foot from Canal Street south, and we had to show proof of residence (in our case, a copy of our lease) to get past the military guards.  With no traffic allowed and no subways running in Lower Manhattan for a week or two, the streets had an eerie emptiness about them.  The prevalence of national guardsmen and NYPD patrols toting machine guns made it feel like a war zone
• At work, where the Internet 1.0 meltdown was still in process, we were in the middle of negotiating a life-saving financing and acquisition of Veripost with Eric Kirby and George.  We hit the pause button on everything, but we picked back up and dusted ourselves off within a day and got those deals done within a few weeks and saved the company
• We had one junior employee in our New York office who got into his car on the afternoon of 9/11, drove to New Hampshire, and never contacted us again.  Just completely blew a fuse and dropped out.  It wasn’t until we tracked down his parents a few days later that we even knew he was safe and sound
• I was fortunate not to lose anyone close in the attacks, but my friend Morten lost over a dozen close friends who were all traders from his town in New Jersey.  He attended every single funeral.  How he got through that (and how others got through their many losses) remains beyond my comprehension, even today

The only thing I have really blogged about over the years related to 9/11 was my post Morning in Tribeca in 2004 when the skeleton of WTC7, the first rebuilt building, was going up.  Now that the Freedom Tower is rising, it finally feels like the Ground Zero site has great forward momentum and will in fact be fully renewed in a few years once the bulk of this construction is done and the tenants have moved in.  That will be a great day for New York, and for America.

My cofounder Cathy wrote a great post on the Bolster blog back in January called Procrastinating Executive Development, in which she talks about the fact that even executives who appreciate the value of professional development usually don’t get to it because they’re too busy or don’t realize how important it is. I see this every day with CEOs and founders. Cathy had a well phrased but somewhat gentle ask at the end of her post:

My ask for all CEOs is this: give each of your executives the gift of feedback now, and hold each other accountable for continued growth and development to match the growth and development of your company.

Let me put it in starker terms:

Grow or Die.

Every executive, every professional, can scale further than they think is possible, and further than you think is possible. Most of us do have some ceiling somewhere…but it will take us years to find it (if we ever find it). The key to scaling is a growth mentality. You have to not just value development, you have to crave it, view it as essential, and prioritize it.

Startups are incredibly dynamic. You’re creating something out of nothing. Disrupting an industry. Revolutionizing something. Putting a dent in the universe. For a startup to succeed, it has to constantly put something in market, learn, calibrate, accelerate, maybe pivot, and most of all grow. How can a leader of a startup scale from one stage of life to the next without focusing on personal growth and development if the job changes from one quarter to the next?

I was lucky enough to have a great leadership team at my prior company, Return Path, over the course of 20 years. Within that long block of time with many executives, there was a particular period of time, roughly 2004-2012, that I jokingly refer to as the “golden age.” That’s when we grew the business from roughly $5mm in revenue to $50 or $60mm. The remarkable thing was that we executed that growth with the same group of 5-6 senior executives. A couple new people joined the team, and we struggled to get one executive role right, but by and large one core group took us from small to mid-sized. Why? We looked at each other — literally, in one meeting where we were talking about professional development — and said, “we have to commit to individual coaching, to team coaching, and to growth as leaders, or the company will outpace us and we’ll be roadkill.”

That set us on a path to focus on our own growth and development as leaders. We were constantly reading and sharing relevant articles, blog posts, and books. We engaged in a lot of coaching and development instruments like MBTI, TKI, and DISC. We learned the value of retrospectives, transparent 360s, and a steady diet of feedback. We challenged ourselves to do better. We worked at it. As one of the members of the Golden Age said of our work, “we went to the gym.”

The “Grow or Die” mantra is real. You can’t possibly be successful in today’s world if you’re not learning, if you don’t have a growth mentality. You are never the smartest person in the room. The minute you are convinced that you are…you’re screwed.

If you don’t believe me, look at the development of your business itself as a metaphor for your own development as a leader. What happens to your startup if it stops growing?

(You can find this post on the Bolster Blog here)

Welcome to the new StartupCEO.com!

I started writing this blog in May of 2004 with an objective of writing about the experience of being a first-time entrepreneur — a startup CEO — inspired by a blog post written by my friend, long-time Board member and mentor Fred Wilson entitled “You’re only a first time CEO once.”  The blog and the receptivity I got along the way from fellow startup CEOs encouraged me to write a book called Startup CEO:  A Field Guide to Scaling Up Your Business, which was originally published in 2013 and then again as a second edition last year in 2020.

Today I am relaunching the blog as StartupCEO.com both to reflect that relevance of that brand as the book continues to get good traction in the startup ecosystem, and to reflect the fact that I’m now on my second startup as CEO, so “Only Once” doesn’t seem so fitting any more.

The web site has a very minimalist design – and I realize many of you read posts on either RSS or email — those will still operate the same as they have been (no new RSS feed).

As I approach the first anniversary of starting our new company, Bolster, where we help startup CEOs scale their teams, themselves, and their boards, I am recommitting to this blog and will try to post at least once a week.  Because there is a lot of overlap between this blog and Bolster’s blog (which I’d encourage you to subscribe to here either by email or RSS), posts will occasionally show up on both blogs, or I’ll put digests of Bolster blog posts here.  

But the Bolster blog will be broader and will also have many additional authors besides me, while this blog will remain distinct about some of the experiences I’m having as a startup CEO.

I realize I haven’t posted much lately.  As you may know, the title of this blog, OnlyOnce, comes from a blog post written by my friend and board member Fred Wilson from Union Square Ventures entitled You Are Only a First-Time CEO Once, which he wrote back in 2003 or 2004.  That inspired me to create a blog for entrepreneurs and leaders.  I’ve written close to 1,000 posts over the years, and the book became the impetus for a book that another friend and board member Brad Feld from Foundry Group encouraged me to write and helped me get published called Startup CEO:  A Field Guide to Scaling Up Your Business back in 2013.

Today is a special day in my entrepreneurial journey and in the life of the company that I started back in 1999 (last century!), Return Path, as we announce that Return Path has entered into a definitive agreement to be acquired by an exciting new company called Validity.  Press release is here.

Over almost 20 years, we’ve built Return Path into one of the largest and (I think) most respected companies in the email industry.  We’ve had a culture of innovation that has led to some groundbreaking products for our customers and partners to help make email marketing work better for consumers as well as marketers, and to help keep inboxes safe and clean for mailbox providers and security companies.  

But the company is unusual in many respects.  One of those is longevity. I’m not sure how many Internet companies started in 1999 are still private, backed and led by the same team the whole time, and generally in the same business they started in.  Another is our values-driven “People First” culture. From Day 1, we have believed that if we attract and retain and develop and invest in the best people, we will make our customers successful with great products and service, and that if we do right by our customers, we will do right long term by our shareholders.  While I know that not every employee who ever walked through our doors had a great experience, I know most did and hope that all of them realize we tried our best. Finally, I’m proud that our company gave birth to a non-profit affiliate Path Forward a few years back at the hands of executives Andy Sautins, Cathy Hawley, and Tami Forman.  Path Forward helps parents get back to work after a career break and helps companies improve their gender diversity and hiring biases and has already been a game changer for dozens of companies and hundreds of women.

Today, Return Path serves almost 4,000 customers in almost every country on the globe, with $100 million in revenue, profitable, and excited about the next leg of our brands’ and our products’ lives in the care of Validity.  If you haven’t heard of Validity before today, watch out – you will hear a LOT about them in the weeks and months ahead. They are an incredibly exciting new company with a vision to help tens of thousands of companies across the globe improve their data quality but also help them use data to improve business results.  That vision, inspired by a new friend, CEO Mark Briggs, is a wonderful fit for Return Path’s products and services and people.

To finish this post where I started, Fred’s exact words in that post which got this blog going were:

What does this mean for entrepreneurs and managers? It means that the first time you run a business, you should admit what you are up against. Don’t let ego get in the way. Ask for help from your board and get coaching and mentoring. And recognize that you may fail at some level. And don’t let the fear of failure get in the way. Because failure isn’t fatal. It may well be a required rite of passage.

All of that is true and has been great advice for me over the years.  But Fred left out one important piece, which is that entrepreneurs need to constantly thank the people around them who either work their butts off as colleagues in the business or who give them helpful advice and coaching.  Return Path’s journey has been a long one, longer than most, and the full list of people to thank is too long for a blog post.

I’ve noted Fred and Brad in this post already and I want to thank them and also thank Greg Sands from Costanoa Ventures, the third member of our “dream team” investor syndicate, for their friendship and unwavering support and good counsel for me and Return Path for almost two decades, as well as many other board members we’ve had over the years including long-time independent directors Jeff Epstein, Scott Petry, and Scott Weiss.

I want to thank my co-founders Jack Sinclair and George Bilbrey, and anyone who has ever been on my executive team, including long-time execs Ken Takahashi, Shawn Nussbaum, Cathy Hawley, Dave Wilby, Anita Absey, Angela Baldonero, Andy Sautins, Louis Bucciarelli, Mark Frein, and David Sieh.  There’s nothing quite like being in the proverbial foxhole with someone during a battle or two or ten to forge a tight bond. I want to thank Andrea Ponchione, my extraordinary assistant for 14 years, who keeps me running, sane, and smiling every day. I want to thank my executive coach Marc Maltz and the members of my CEO Forum for allowing me to be unplugged and for their friendship and advice.  I want to thank all of Return Path’s 430 employees today and over 1,300 ever for their hard work in building our company and culture together and for our 4,000 customers and partners for putting their faith in us to help them solve some of their biggest challenges with email.

Finally, no thank you list for this journey would be complete without saying a special thank you to my wonderful wife Mariquita and kids Casey, Wilson, and Elyse.  They deserve some kind of special honor for being inspirational cabin-mates on the entrepreneurial roller coaster without ever being asked if they were up for it.

This event may inspire me to begin writing more regularly again on OnlyOnce.  Stay tuned!

(This post is running concurrently on the Return Path blog.)

It is now widely understood that the Internet runs on data. I first blogged about this in 2004—14 years ago!— here.  People have come to expect a robust—and free!—online experience. Whether it’s a shopping app or a social media platform like Instagram, these free experiences provide a valuable service. And like most businesses, the companies that provide these experiences need to make money somehow. Consumers are coming to understand and appreciate that the real cost of a “free” internet lies in advertising and data collection.

Today, the Wall Street Journal ran an article exploring the data privacy practices of Google and some of the third party developers who utilize their G Suite ecosystem. Return Path was among the companies mentioned in this article. We worked closely with the journalist on this piece and shared a great deal of information about the inner workings of Return Path, because we feel it’s important to be completely transparent when it comes to matters of privacy.  Unfortunately, the reporter was extremely and somewhat carelessly selective in terms of what information he chose to use from us — as well as listing a number of vague sources who claimed to be “in the know” about the inner workings of Return Path. We know that he reached out to dozens of former employees via LinkedIn, for example, many of whom haven’t worked here in years.

While the article does not uncover any wrongdoings on our part (in fact, it does mention that we have first-party relationships with and consent from our consumers), it does raise a larger privacy and security concern against Google for allowing developer access to Gmail’s API to create email apps. The article goes on to explain that computers scan this data, and in some rare cases, the data is reviewed by actual people. The article mentions a specific incident at Return Path where approximately 8,000 emails were manually reviewed for classification. As anyone who knows anything about software knows, humans program software – artificial intelligence comes directly from human intelligence.  Any time our engineers or data scientists personally review emails in our panel (which again, is completely consistent with our policies), we take great care to limit who has access to the data, supervise all access to the data, deploying a Virtual Safety Room, where data cannot leave this VSR and all data is destroyed after the work is completed.

I want to reaffirm that Return Path is absolutely committed to data security and consumer data privacy. Since our founding in 1999, we’ve kept consumer choice, permission, and transparency at the center of our business. To this end, we go above and beyond what’s legally required and take abundant care to make sure that:

1. Our privacy policy is prominently displayed and written in plain English;
2. The user must actively agree to its terms (no pre-checked boxes); and
3. A summary of its main points is shown to every user at signup without the need to click a link

While a privacy expert quoted in the article (and someone we’ve known and respected for years) says that he believes consumers would want to know that humans, not only computers, might have access to data, we understand that unfortunately, most consumers don’t pay attention to privacy policies and statements, which is precisely why we developed succinct and plain-English “just-in-time” policies years before GDPR required them. When filling out a form people may not think about the impact that providing the information will have at a later date. Just-in-time notices work by appearing on the individual’s screen at the point where they input personal data, providing a brief message explaining how the information they are about to provide will be used, for example:

It’s disappointing to say the least that the reporter called this a “dirty secret.”  It looks pretty much the opposite of a secret to me.

In addition to our own policies and practices, Return Path is deeply involved in ongoing industry work related to privacy. We lead many of these efforts, and maintain long-term trusted relationships with numerous privacy associations. Our business runs on data, and keeping that data secure is our top priority.

Further, I want to address the scare tactics employed by this journalist, and many others, in addressing the topics of data collection, data security, and who has access to data. It’s common these days to see articles that highlight the dangers that can accompany everyday online activities like downloading an app or browsing a retail website. And while consumers certainly have a responsibility to protect themselves through education, it’s also important to understand the importance of data sharing, open ecosystems, and third party developers.  And more than that, it’s important to draw distinctions between companies who have direct relationships with and consent from consumers and ones who do not.

While they may not be top of mind, open ecosystems that allow for third-party innovation are an essential part of how the internet functions. Big players like Facebook and Google provide core platforms, but without APIs and independent developers, innovation and usability would be limited to big companies with significant market power and budgets—to the detriment of consumers. Think about it—would Facebook have become as wildly popular without the in-app phenomenon that was Farmville? Probably, but you get the point: third party applications add a new level of value and usefulness that a platform alone can’t provide.

Consumers often fall into the trap of believing that the solution to all of their online worries is to deny access to their data. But the reality is that, if they take steps like opting out of online tracking, the quality of their online experience will deteriorate dramatically. Rather than being served relevant ads and content that relates to their browsing behaviors and online preferences, they’ll see random ads from the highest bidder. Unfortunately some companies take personalization to an extreme, but an online experience devoid of personalization would feel oddly generic to the average consumer.

There’s been a lot of attention in the media lately—and rightfully so—about privacy policies and data privacy practices, specifically as they relate to data collection and access by third parties. The new GDPR regulations in the EU have driven much of this discussion, as has the potential misuse of private information about millions of Facebook users.

One of Return Path’s core values is transparency, including how we collect, access and use data.  Our situation and relationship with consumers is different from those of other companies. If anyone has additional questions, please reach out.

Transparency Rules

I think each and every one of our 13 core values at Return Path is important to our culture and to our success.  And I generally don’t rank them.  But if I did, People First is a leading contender to be at the top of the list. The other leading contender would be this last one in the series:

We believe in being transparent and direct

The big Inc. Magazine story about us last year talked a lot about our commitment to transparency and some of the challenges that come with being transparent and direct with people. I’d like to highlight here some of the benefits of being transparent, and the benefits of being direct (sometimes those two things are the same, sometimes they are different).

Transparency’s benefits are so numerous that it’s hard to pick just one or two themes to write about, but my favorite benefit is empowerment.  Especially in a world where information is increasingly available and free, hoarding it comes at a high cost.

• If everyone in the company knows that you’re short of plan and disappointed about that, the majority of people will exercise hawkish judgment about expenses.  The opposite is true as well.  If people know you’re running ahead of plan, they will be more willing to take risks and make investments. Without transparency of financials, people are just more in the dark and looking for all answers and judgment to come from above
• If everyone on your staff understands the process you went through to make a tough call about an element of your strategy, they are not only more likely to understand and support the decision, but they learn from you how to make decisions in the first place
• If your Board knows you’re having a tough quarter from the get go, they’re not surprised at the quarterly meeting and don’t force you to spend painful and precious minutes in the meeting On the firing line reporting on the details. Instead, they can spend time leading up to the meeting thinking about the details of the problems and how they can help or what insights they can bring to bear

Transparency does have some limits, even today.  There are three main limits we run into. One is compensation — still too touchy and wrapped up in people’s self esteem to post on the wall (though I have heard about a couple companies that do that, believe it or not). Another is terminations. Although you might want to tell the company that you fired Sally because she wasn’t carrying her weight, the long term value you derive from dignity and kindness trump any short term value you might derive from such a statement (plus, people know when Sally isn’t carrying her weight, anyway). The third limit to transparency is around half-baked ideas. Although you might sometimes want to try ideas on for size publicly, you have to be careful not to send people scurrying off in the wrong direction just because you blurted something out in a meeting.

The second half of this value statement is about being direct.  Being direct mostly has benefits in terms of efficiency. You can be direct and still be polite and kind.  But being direct means not beating around the bush, being political, or being conflict avoidant.  It means nipping problems in the bud and saving yourself time or money in the long run.

• If you are direct with an employee who is not performing well with data to back it up, the employee has a much better shot at improving than if you delegate the feedback to HR, wait for the next annual performance review, or go passive and skip the feedback entirely
• If you are direct with a boss who you think is treating you unfairly, your odds of fixing the situation go way up
• If there’s bad news to deliver, be direct about it — look the other person in the eye, deliver the news crisply and succinctly, and as quickly as you can after finding it out or deciding on it yourself

Avoid euphemisms at all cost. Telling someone you “might have to rethink things” is not the same as saying “I will have to fire you if xyz don’t happen in the next 30 days.” Saying “xyz would be good for you to do” is not the same as saying “the way for you to get promoted is to consistently do xyz.”

Being transparent and direct are increasingly table stakes for successful companies full of knowledge workers who want to be empowered and clear on where they stand.

I’ve really enjoyed writing all of these values out in living color. I will do a wrap up post shortly.

Calling for the Boss’s Head

Maybe it’s just a heightened sense of awareness on my part, but I feel like our culture has really turned up the time-to-fire-the-boss-o-meter to a new level of late.  What is going on that has caused the media and vocal people among us feel this thirst for public lynchings over a single incident?  The list isn’t small — just in recent weeks or months, you have Rumsfeld, Dunn (HP), Gonzales, Imus, Wolfowitz, and even last week, Snyder (Vonage).  And I’m sure there are a dozen others, both corporate and political, that I’m not dredging up mentally here on a Sunday night.

Now I’m all for accountability, believe me, but sometimes it doesn’t help an organization for someone to resign at the top over a single incident.  Jarvis says it best when he says that he would have fired Imus a long time ago because he’s boring and because he’s always been a racist, not because of a few choice words last week.  Should chronic poor performers be dismissed regardless of level?  Absolutely.  Should a leader be forced to step down just to make a point?  I’m much less certain.  In some ways, to carry Jarvis’s theme forward, that kind of dismissal is just a sign to me of lackadaisical oversight along the way, finally coming to a head.

I’m no psychologist, but my guess is that in many cases, a flash dismissal of another otherwise competent leader can pretty bad and traumatic for the underlying organization (be it a company or country).  Consider the alternative — an honest apology, some kind of retribution, and a clear and conspicuous post-mortem — that leaves the ship with its captain and sends the message to the troops that honest mistakes are tolerated as long as they’re not repeated and amends are made.

This in no way is meant to defend the actions of any specifics of the above list.  For many of them, their actions may have prompted an unrecoverable crisis of confidence.  But for my part, I’d rather see regular accountability and transparency, not just at the peaks and troughs.

An Execution Problem

My biggest takeaway from the TED Conference this week is that we — that is to say, all of us in the world — have an execution problem.  This is a common phrase in business, right?  You’ve done the work of market research, positioning, and strategy and feel good about it.  Perhaps as a bigger company you splurge and hire McKinsey or the like to validate your assumptions or develop some new ones.  And now all you have to do is execute — make it happen.  And yet so many businesses can’t make the right things happen so that it all comes together.  I’d guess, completely unscientifically, that far, far more businesses have execution problems than strategic ones.  Turns out, it’s tough to get things to happen as planned BUT with enough flexibility to change course as needed.  Getting things done is hard.

So what do I mean when I say that humanity has an execution problem?  If nothing else, the intellectual potpourri that is TED showed me this week that we know a lot about the world’s problems, and we don’t lack for vision and data on how to solve them.  A few of the things we heard about this week are the knowledge — and in many cases, even real experiences — about how to:

– Steer the evolution of deadly disease-causing bacteria to make them more benign within a decade

– Build world class urban transportation systems and growth plans to improve urban living and control pollution

– Drive down the cost of critical pharmaceuticals to developing nations by 95%

– Dramatically curb CO2 emissions

We have the knowledge, and yet the problems remain unsolved.  Why is that?  Unlike the organized and controlled and confined boundaries of a company, these kinds of problems are thornier to solve, even if the majority of humans agree they need to be solved.  Whether the roadblock is political, financial, social — or (d) all of the above — we seem to be stuck in a series of execution problems.

The bright spot out of all of this (at least from this week’s discussions) is that, perhaps more than ever before in the history of mankind, many of our most talented leaders AND our wealthiest citizens are taking more of a personal stake in not just defining the problems and solutions, but making them happen.  They’re giving more money, buiding more organizations, and spending more time personally influencing society and telling and showing the stories.  It will take years to see if these efforts can solve our execution problems, but in the meantime, the extraordinary efforts are things we can all be proud of.